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Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoARIEL SCHALIT | ASSOCIATED PRESSIlia Atias, center, mourns over the coffin bearing her son, Israeli private Eden Atias, during his funeral in northern Israel. Eden Atias, 19, was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian teen on a bus yesterday.

By Isabel KershnerTHE NEW YORK TIMES • Thursday November 14, 2013 6:25 AM

JERUSALEM — A Palestinian teenager fatally stabbed a 19-year-old Israeli soldier on a bus in
northern Israel yesterday, according to police, stirring outrage in Israel and injecting another
element

of uncertainty into a peace process already clouded over Israeli settlement plans in the West
Bank.

The Palestinian leadership was expected to meet today to discuss whether to continue the
negotiations that began this past summer and that were supposed to continue for nine months,
according to a Palestinian official involved in the talks. The Palestinians were infuriated by the
news on Tuesday that Israel’s housing minister, Uri Ariel, had initiated planning for 20,000 new
settlement homes. A White House spokesman said the Obama administration was “deeply concerned” over
the plan.

In a late-night attempt to calm the storm on Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
instructed Ariel, a rightist who opposes concessions to the Palestinians, to reconsider the plan,
noting that it had not been coordinated with Netanyahu’s office. Ariel agreed to a review, but it
was still not clear yesterday whether the plan would be withdrawn, as the Palestinian leadership
has demanded.

The disarray in the peace process was evident in the resignations of the two Palestinian
negotiators, Saeb Erekat and Muhammad Shtayyeh, in frustration over a lack of progress in the peace
talks and the continued Israeli settlement activity. The president of the Palestinian Authority,
Mahmoud Abbas, told an Egyptian television network, CBC, this week that the two had resigned,
although he suggested that they would nonetheless remain; it was unclear whether their resignations
were ever accepted.

“Either we can convince them to return, and we’re trying with them, or we will form a new
delegation,” Abbas told Reuters before the news of the settlement plans came to light.

The stabbing yesterday took place when the bus, traveling from Nazareth to Tel Aviv, pulled into
the station in the northern town of Afula.

The Israeli military said the soldier, Eden Atias, 19, had been in uniform and on his way to an
army base at the time of the attack. He was stabbed several times in the upper body, said Micky
Rosenfeld, a spokesman for the police. Rosenfeld said a 16-year-old Palestinian from Jenin, West
Bank, was apprehended at the scene. He told security personnel under questioning that he had acted
to avenge one or more relatives serving time in Israeli prison. Israeli news media identified the
suspect as Hussein Jawadra.

The attack came after a string of violent incidents in the West Bank in recent months that ended
a period of relative calm. The attacks have prompted calls from rightist Israeli politicians to
re-examine its agreement to release 104 long-serving Palestinian inmates from Israeli prisons in
four batches, as part of a U.S.-brokered deal to resume peace talks. Two of the four groups have
been released.